Anthony Hecht (January 16, 1923 – October 20, 2004) was U.S. Poet Laureate from 1982 – 1984. He is the author of seven books of poetry, among them The Hard Hours, which received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1968, Flight Among the Tombs, and The Transparent Man. Hecht granted permission to Beltway Poetry Quarterly to publish poems from his last book, The Darkness and the Light, prior to its publication by Alfred A. Knopf in June 2001. In 1984, he received the Eugenio Montale Award for a lifetime achievement in poetry, and in 2000 the Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. Hecht was posthumously awarded the National Medal of Arts. He wrote a critical study of the poetry of W. H. Auden, and On the Laws of the Poetic Art (Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts). He taught at Bard College, the University of Rochester, and Georgetown University, and lived in Washington, DC.
